Old English Declensions in Reference to Contemporary German Declensions Hradel, Miroslav Undergraduate thesis / Završni rad 2018 Degree Grantor / Ustanova koja je dodijelila akademski / stručni stupanj: University of Zadar / Sveučilište u Zadru Permanent link / Trajna poveznica: https://urn.nsk.hr/urn:nbn:hr:162:269161 Rights / Prava: In copyright Download date / Datum preuzimanja: 2021-09-30 Repository / Repozitorij: University of Zadar Institutional Repository of evaluation works Sveučilište u Zadru Odjel za anglistiku Preddiplomski studij engleskoga jezika i književnosti Miroslav Hradel Old English Declensions in Reference to Contemporary German Declensions Završni rad Zadar, 2018. Sveučilište u Zadru Odjel za anglistiku Preddiplomski studij engleskoga jezika i književnosti Old English Declensions in Reference to Contemporary German Declensions Završni rad Student/ica: Mentor/ica: Miroslav Hradel doc. Lidija Štrmelj Zadar, 2018. Izjava o akademskoj čestitosti Ja, Miroslav Hradel, ovime izjavljujem da je moj završni rad pod naslovom Old English Declensions in Reference to Contemporary German Declensions rezultat mojega vlastitog rada, da se temelji na mojim istraživanjima te da se oslanja na izvore i radove navedene u bilješkama i popisu literature. Ni jedan dio mojega rada nije napisan na nedopušten način, odnosno nije prepisan iz necitiranih radova i ne krši bilo čija autorska prava. Izjavljujem da ni jedan dio ovoga rada nije iskorišten u kojem drugom radu pri bilo kojoj drugoj visokoškolskoj, znanstvenoj, obrazovnoj ili inoj ustanovi. Sadržaj mojega rada u potpunosti odgovara sadržaju obranjenoga i nakon obrane uređenoga rada. Zadar, 2. srpanj 2018. Hradel 4 Table of contents: 1. Introduction ..........…………………………………………………………………………. 5 2. The Common Origin of English and German ………………………..……………………. 6 3. Case, Gender and Number ………...............................………………..…………………. 10 4. Pronouns ………………………………………………………………………………….. 14 5. Articles …………………………………………………………………………………… 18 6. Nouns ………………………………………………………………………….................. 19 7. Adjectives …………………………………………………………………….................... 29 8. Conclusion …………………………………………………………………...................... 34 9. Works Cited ………………………………………………………………………......... 35 10. OLD ENGLISH DECLENSIONS IN REFERENCE TO CONTEMPORARY GERMAN DECLENSIONS: Summary and key words…………..……...........................…………....... 37 11. STAROENGLESKA SKLONIDBA U ODNOSU NA SUVREMENU NJEMAČKU SKLONIDBU: Sažetak i ključne riječi…………….......................................................……. 38 Hradel 5 1. Introduction The opening chapter of the paper focuses on explaining the common origin of English and German, historically two closely related languages in the West Germanic group of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. The starting point for the main part of the paper, therefore, is the assumption that there is a significant number of grammatical features that are shared between the oldest recorded form of the English language and the current form of the German language, even though they are separated from each other by roughly a thousand years of history. The paper uses a combination of the diachronic, comparative and contrastive methods. In other words, Old English pronouns, articles, nouns and adjectives are compared and contrasted with their equivalents and cognates in contemporary German. The main aim of the paper is to define and attempt to explain the similarities and differences that appear when the two stages in the respective development of English and German are considered. Due to the vast temporal gap between Old English and contemporary German, the paper ignores the influence of the Norman Conquest on the development of the English language, except for the fact that it does attempt to clarify which of the typically Germanic, or West Germanic, grammatical features English lacks in its contemporary form. The basics of some of the phonological changes that affected the Germanic languages are discussed within the opening chapter, mainly to give an insight into the similarities and differences in pronunciation, but also because the phonemic environment often seems to correlate with the choice of inflectional endings in both Old English and contemporary German. Hradel 6 2. The Common Origin of English and German Within the Indo-European language family, English and German not only both belong to the same branch, the Germanic one, but also to the same group within it, the West Germanic one. Like all the West Germanic languages, Dutch being the third major one, they have been descended from a number of closely related dialects that were spoken among the Germanic tribes populating the lowlands along the south-eastern coast of the North Sea at the beginning of the Common Era. A few centuries earlier, the Germanic tribes collectively formed a homogeneous cultural and linguistic group. The common language they spoke was the unattested and hypothetical primordial Germanic language that is now referred to as Proto- Germanic. The original range of its speakers encompassed what is presently southern Sweden, the entire state of Denmark, and northern Germany between the Elbe and the Oder. The movement of some of the Germanic tribes away from these regions led to the dialectal diversification of Proto-Germanic, consequently splitting the Germanic languages into three groups. In addition to the West Germanic one, these three groups include the North Germanic and East Germanic ones. The North Germanic languages of the present time are Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese. They have been descended from the dialects that were spoken among the Germanic tribes that stayed within the geographical borders of Scandinavia, with Old Norse being their earliest recorded form. The East Germanic languages began as a group of dialects that were spoken among the Germanic tribes that expanded east of the Oder, all the way to the coast of the Black Sea. They became extinct in the seventeenth century, but the only attested language belonging to the group, Gothic, remains a valuable asset in historical linguistics as the earliest Germanic language recorded in literary use, thanks to a fragmentary translation of the Bible that was done in the fourth century AD (Auberle and Klosa 194-195; Barber 85-91). Hradel 7 The expansion of the West Germanic tribes to Britain began around the middle of the fifth century AD. Therefore, this happens to be the point in history that is commonly given as the beginning of the Old English period, even though it is virtually impossible to speak of Old English as a more or less uniform language until two or three centuries later. This earliest recorded form of the English language, also known as Anglo-Saxon, possibly developed from a unique Anglo-Frisian language, that is a group of mutually intelligible dialects. Frisian, nowadays a minority language in the northern regions of both the Netherlands and Germany, is still commonly mentioned as the closest linguistic relative of English. Another closely related language is Old Saxon. It is the earliest recorded predecessor of Low German, which is presently spoken in northern Germany and sometimes considered to be a separate language from both German and Dutch. The most prestigious dialect of Old English is known as West Saxon. Considering the fact that it was the dialect in which nearly all literary texts were written between the ninth and eleventh centuries AD, West Saxon, that is the late variety of it, is used as the basis for studying the grammar and vocabulary of Old English in the present time (Barber 89-90; Cassidy and Ringler 1-3; Quirk and Wrenn 1-6). Some of the West Germanic tribes continued to move further towards the south, concentrating in the regions adjacent to the Rhine and eventually expanding all the way to the Alps. Their migration is believed to have stopped by the end of the sixth century AD, by which time the dialects they spoke had started to diverge from the remaining West Germanic dialects. The diversion would eventually prove to have been strong enough to make these dialects become a separate subgroup within the West Germanic group of languages. The cause of it was a consonant shift that was primarily concerned with the transformation of the voiceless plosives [p], [t] and [k] into the voiceless fricatives [f], [s] and [x], respectively. The dialects affected by the consonant shift became known as High German, due to the fact that, as opposed to Low German in the lowlands of the north, they were spoken by the inhabitants Hradel 8 of the hilly and mountainous south. These changes are attested in Old High German, a literary language between the eighth and eleventh centuries AD. However, since a later High German dialect provided the basis for the first standardized variety of the German language, it is possible to illustrate the High German consonant shift by synchronically comparing and contrasting the affected words in contemporary German with their equivalents and cognates in English and Dutch. For example, the German word that corresponds to the English and Dutch word water happens to be Wasser. In some cases, the original plosive would be paired with the resulting fricative. As a result of this secondary type of the High German consonant shift, the English word apple and the Dutch word appel are found as Apfel in German, with the affricate [pf] occurring in the position of the usual West Germanic plosive [p]. Needless to say, Low German and Frisian remained unaffected by the High